Indiana Fostering Statewide Remedial Policies for Higher Education

The Blueprint for College Readiness Report: A 50-State Policy Analysis states that Indiana has been very proactive in addressing all 10 anchor benchmarks, and is one of 19 states that has set attainment goals in its master plan in a P-20 pipeline to foster a “robust statewide remedial education” (http://www.ecs.org/docs/ECSBlueprint.pdf ).

The Indiana Commission for Higher Education (ICHE) was favorably cited for its approach to setting Indiana State Common policies for minimum placement standards into remedial or credit-bearing college courses. Indiana now has a state-wide course placement policy that allows for multiple measures. The policy permits specific scores, as well as other factors such as high school GPA and type of diploma to be used to place first-time college students in math and language pathways so that students can avoid potential failures. In 2010, ICHE implemented a policy to use College Board’s Accuplacer exam. Indiana policy makers could do more for higher education in the area of fostering a smoother transfer policies and course credit awarding.

“The Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) has developed and posted to its website a series of tutorial videos to build the capacity of all teachers to successfully write and implement Student Learning Objectives (SLOs). These Objectives are one of three measures of student growth under IDOE’s new teacher evaluation system, which also includes individual student growth and school-wide growth based on annual standardized assessment results.

IDOE has also created the innovative Division of Outreach for School Improvement. This division works proactively with schools at the grassroots level to support educators, while monitoring, developing and strengthening school improvement to ensure that school improvement efforts in Indiana are intentionally aligned to the federal turnaround principles”.